Respond to Your Customers with Responsive Design

The clatter of the garage quietens as I close the door behind me. I take a seat in the waiting room and look back to see that the mechanic has just pulled my car into the bay. Great. I’ve got a few minutes to kill. So, I pull out my mobile phone intent on researching a major purchase. I’ve heard awesome things about your company. I key your name into my search bar and up pops your website, first on the list. Great. But, wait. Your website is making me pinch, zoom, and crane my neck. I don’t have time for this. My oil change will be finished soon, and I have a million other things to do. Oh well, like 61% of the visitors to a non-responsive site, I click back and visit a competitor’s responsive site.

This is how we shop now. According to Google, 90% of smartphone users take steps “while out and about” toward long term goals or multi-step processes. Purchasing decisions, big and small, personal and professional, are now made during oil changes, soccer practices, and intermission at dance recitals, and they are made on mobile devices.

Mobileggedon and Micro-Moments

Back in April, Google changed its algorithm to reward mobile-friendly websites. Unlike past updates, this one was broadcast well ahead of time to give businesses a chance to respond, literally. At first, you may have panicked and scrambled to find a responsive solution. Then you realized that the algorithm was only going to affect mobile organic search traffic, which itself only represents a small fraction of your total organic search traffic. So you decided to wait; push mobile redesign off into next year’s budget. Now, a few months have passed. Looking at your total organic search referral numbers, you see there’s barely a dent. Phew. You were right. But in the back of your mind, you know this is only the beginning. Mobileggedon is the first signal of a sea change. You do need to worry, and you need to worry now.

“The old days of predictable, periodic media sessions have been replaced by numerous short bursts of digital activity throughout the day.”

Adapt or Respond?

To show your potential customers that you want their business, an adaptive design should no longer be a consideration. Though it successfully presents your content on a mobile device, it fails to solve some of the primary problems your mobile strategy is looking to solve. Adaptive design means updating content in two places – your website and your mobile site. It also means two URLs and different HTML for each site. This means a dent in your search engine rankings. Also, as connected devices evolve, i.e. wearables, your adaptive design will quickly become as obsolete as your static website. A responsive design, with a single URL and HTML, will always respond and reshape, as best as it can, to whatever device is accessing your content.

A mobile solution is no longer about future proofing your website. This is about the present. Decisions to buy and attitudes toward current research continues to expand the horizons of the infrastructure along several dimensions, such as scale, performance, and higher-level functionality.your brand are being shaped on mobile devices. By 2017, according to DazeInfo, “2.97 billion users are expected to use the internet over their phones, which is around 91% of total internet users.”Your static desktop website is, as George Colony of Forrester Research put it, going to go the way of AM radio. And if your website is AM radio, then an adaptive site is FM, a better solution, but still stuck on the same dials. To be satellite radio, live streaming everywhere in every micro-moment, you need a responsive design.

At SilverTech, we are customer experience architects. We understand the micro-moments and the need to be always on for your customers, present and future. Beyond building a responsive solution for you, we can also integrate a responsive CMS, like HubSpot’s, with your CRM. We’ll make sure your business is ready for the next oil change, soccer practice, or dance recital.